Willow Run: A Bomber Every 63 Minutes

The airport you're passing was once the most remarkable factory on earth.

In nineteen forty-one, with the United States edging toward war, the Roosevelt administration turned to Henry Ford with a challenge: mass-produce the Consolidated B-twenty-four Liberator heavy bomber the same way Ford made automobiles. Ford accepted. Architect Albert Kahn designed what became the largest building under a single roof in the world at that time, more than a mile long, with dual parallel assembly lines running its entire length. Workers called it Willow Run.

Production started slowly and the early stumbles were embarrassing. Critics in Washington dubbed it Will It Run. But Ford engineers solved the tooling problems, the workforce scaled from a few hundred to forty-two thousand five hundred people, and by nineteen forty-four the plant was completing one B-twenty-four every sixty-three minutes. By the time the war ended, Willow Run had produced eight thousand six hundred eighty-five Liberators, nearly half of all B-twenty-fours built during the entire conflict.

The plant drew workers from across the country, many of them African Americans from the South and white migrants from Appalachia. The housing strains triggered the nineteen forty-three Detroit race riot, one of the worst civil uprisings of the war years. Thousands of families were living in trailers and hastily built barracks within sight of the plant.

After the war, Kaiser-Frazer moved in and built civilian vehicles and cargo planes until going bankrupt in nineteen fifty-three. General Motors bought the plant in nineteen fifty-six and made transmissions there for decades.

The bomber plant building itself was mostly demolished in two thousand fourteen despite a preservation campaign. The attached airport survived and still operates today. A small section of the original factory was saved and houses the Yankee Air Museum, where a restored B-twenty-four sits as a reminder of what this flat stretch of Michigan farmland once produced.